2 Getting Started with Oracle Secure Enterprise Search

This chapter provides a brief introduction to using Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES). More information is provided later in this book, as well as in the online help for the administration tool.

This chapter contains the following topics:

Getting Started Basics with Oracle Secure Enterprise Search
Understanding the Administration Tool

Getting Started Basics with Oracle Secure Enterprise Search

After you have successfully installed Oracle SES, you can start crawling your data. Open a browser, enter the URL provided at the end of the installation for the administration tool (http://host:port/search/admin/index.jsp), and log on.

Here are the basic steps to start using Oracle SES quickly:

Define one or more sources for the data you want to search on the Home - Sources page. For example, if your data is in Web pages, then select Web source. A crawl schedule is automatically created along with the source. If Start Crawling Immediately is selected, then the crawler will start crawling after you click Create.
Check the crawler progress and status on the Home - Schedules page. (Click Refresh Status.) From the status page, you can view statistics of the crawl.
Test whether users can search this source by clicking the Search link in the upper right corner of any page. This brings up the search page in a new window. (The URL for Search should be http://host:port/search/query/search.
Monitor your search statistics on the Home - General page and the Home - Statistics page.

Note:

For Web sources, Oracle SES is configured to crawl Web sites in the intranet within the corporate firewall. To crawl Web sites on the Internet (also referred to as external Web sites), Oracle SES needs the HTTP proxy server information. See the Global Settings - Proxy Settings page.

It may help to define crawling parameters before you start crawling.

Understanding the Administration Tool

There are many options in the administration tool for managing and customizing Oracle SES to suit your enterprise. This section describes some of the tasks available in the administration tool.

Home Tab

The Home tab consists of the General, Sources, Schedules, and Statistics subtabs.

Description of the illustration home.gif

Home - General

This is the home page for Oracle SES. The Summary section shows an overview of the system's search performance, both quality and speed, over the past seven days. The Failed Schedules section lists all schedules that have failed. A failed schedule is one in which the crawler encountered fatal error, such as an indexing error or a source-specific login error, and cannot proceed. A failed schedule could be the result of a partial collection and indexing of documents.
Home - Sources

A collection of information is called a source. Each source has a type, such as a Web site or a database table. User-defined source types are created on the Global Settings - Source Types page. The list includes any available user-defined source types. You can create as many sources as you want.
Home - Schedules

This page lets you view, edit, create, delete, stop, or start a schedule. Schedules define the frequency at which the index is updated with information about each source.
Home - Statistics

This page provides n umerous search and crawler statistics, such as most popular queries and crawler progress.

Note:
Some statistics constantly show up-to-date information, while others are cached hourly to improve performance. The Last Refreshed time shows the actual time of the statistics displayed. Check the online help for each statistics page to confirm if the statistics are up-to-date or cached hourly.

Search Tab

The Search tab consists of the Relevancy, Suggested Links, Suggested Content, Alternate Words, and Source Groups subtabs. These pages help you improve search quality.

Description of the illustration search.gif

Search - Relevancy

Make important documents easier to find with relevancy boosting. Oracle SES lets you influence the order of documents in the result list for a particular search. For example, your company Web site could have a home page for documentation that you want to appear high in the results of any search for "documentation".
Search - Suggested Links

Direct users to a particular Web site for a search string. For example, when users search for "Oracle SES documentation" or "Enterprise Search documentation" or "Search documentation", you could suggest http://www.oracle.com/technology. In the default search page, suggested links are displayed at the top of the search result list. This is especially useful to provide links to important Web pages that are not crawled by Oracle SES.
Search - Suggested Content

Suggest actual content (as opposed to links) to be displayed along with the result list. For example, when an end user searches for contact information on a coworker, Oracle SES fetches the content from the suggested content provider and returns the contact information (e-mail address, phone number, and so on) for that person with the result list. Suggested content results appear in tabbed panes above the query results.
Search - Alternate Words

Use alternate words to suggest alternative search queries to users. This is useful for fixing common errors that users make in searching (for example, entering Oracel instead of Oracle). Also, synonyms can provide more relevant results; for example, cellular phones for cell phones or wireless phones. Additional uses for alternate keywords are for product code names and abbreviations.
Search - Source Groups

Source groups are groups of sources that can be searched together. A source group consists of one or more sources, and a source can be assigned to multiple source groups. On the basic Search page, users can browse source groups that the administrator created. If no source group is selected, then all documents are searched.

Global Settings Tab

The Global Settings tab includes links to configure settings for your Oracle SES environment.

Description of the illustration global10182.gif

This section describes some of the global configuration pages.

Crawler Configuration

This page configures global crawler settings, such as crawling depth, language, and maximum document size.

After a source has been created, you can define crawling parameters, such as URL boun dary rules and crawling depth, for that source by editing that source on the Home - Sources page.

See Also:
"Overview of Crawler Settings"
Query Configuration

This page includes several options, including the following: maximum number of results returned, display URL, spell checking, statistics collection, URL submission, federated search, and secure search.
Identity Management Setup

This page lets you set up connections between Oracle Secure Enterprise Search and any identity management system to validate and authenticate users. This is necessary for secure searches. Ora cle SES uses an identity plug-in as an interface to an identity management system.
Configure Search Results List

This page lets you customize the look and feel of the search result list using XSLT and CSS style sheets.
Configure Clustering in Search Results

Real-time clustering organizes search results into various groups to provide end users with different views on the top results. Clustered documents within one group (called a cluster node) share the same common topics or property values. A cluster node with a large document set can be categorized into child cluster nodes, and a hierarchy cluster result tree is built. Users can navigate directly to a specific cluster node or refine their query by combining the original query and cluster results.